Head of Observability & Security Engineering

Head of Observability & Security Engineering

Employer:

Co-op Group

Location:

Pay:

Meets national minimum wage

Contract Type:

Permanent

Hours:

Full time

Disability Confident:

No

Closing Date:

20/08/2026

Head of Observability & Security Engineering Up to £100.000 plus private healthcare, company car or car allowance and more great benefits (Work Level
4) Manchester city centre

• in this role you'll work in a hybrid way splitting your time between home and the office around once a week (find out more about our hybrid working policy at ). We're open to applications from people who may require flexible working arrangements.

There'll be an opportunity to discuss your flexible working requirements during the interview process, and at offer stage.

We're reshaping our Digital, Technology and Data function for the future, creating new opportunities, strengthening our capability, and building clearer, more resilient ways of working so we can deliver even better services for our Co-op, our colleagues, members and customers.

We're looking for a Head of Observability and Security Engineering to join our Technology Operations and Assurance team and help us build and run the platforms that keep our systems secure, resilient and easy to understand.

In this role, you'll lead the design, build and operation of observability, security, identity and automation capabilities, making sure we have the right insight, control and engineering foundations to support the organisation, bringing data together to give a complete, real-time view of what's happening across our technology estate.

Why this role matters This is a key leadership role at the heart of how we run and protect our technology.

You'll shape how we monitor, secure and automate across a complex estate, ensuring we have accurate data, clear insight and strong engineering in place to support everything we do.

This is an area of real growth for us, where we're moving towards more proactive, intelligence-led capabilities, helping us detect and respond to risks earlier and anticipate issues before they happen.

In this role you'll have the opportunity to drive meaningful change at scale, from modernising tooling and improving resilience to enabling business transformation, while leading a skilled team in a purpose-led organisation.

You'll play a key role in building innovative, future-ready capabilities, working with modern technologies and helping shape a truly best-in-class observability and security engineering function.

What you'll do

• Lead the strategy and delivery of observability, security engineering and platform tooling across the organisation
• Design and implement enterprise observability, covering logging, metrics, tracing and telemetry across cloud, on prem and SaaS environments, ensuring we have complete visibility across all platforms
• Oversee the development of a future-state CMDB and its integration with ITSM platforms, enabling better service visibility and decision-making
• Drive automation and intelligent engineering approaches to reduce manual effort and improve operational reliability, supporting more proactive and self-healing operations
• Lead identity and access management engineering, including cloud identity, privileged access and lifecycle automation
• Ensure security logging and telemetry support effective threat detection, response and regulatory requirements
• Partner with technology, security and business teams to embed secure, resilient engineering into major programmes, including cloud and M&A activity, bringing together data and insight from across domains
• Build and lead a high-performing engineering team, setting clear direction, standards and ways of working, creating a culture of innovation, strong engineering practice and continuous improvement What you'll bring We're committed to making our roles as accessible as possible, so we only ask for the minimum criteria.

To thrive here, you'll need to bring:

• Strong senior leadership experience in platform, security or engineering roles within a complex environment
• Deep understanding of observability practices, including logging, metrics, tracing and telemetry
• Experience designing and delivering large-scale…